Labor Day To Arrive A Bit Early

The Icemen`s Union will not cometh to this year`s Chicago Labor Day parade. Nor will the Nail Makers Union, Hair Spinners Union or White Rats Union. They`re all dead.

Those that are alive, if not necessarily all kicking, must rearrange their calendars, because a traditional Monday event has been switched to Friday.

The executive board of the Chicago Federation of Labor made the move after a small poll of parade activists suggested that Friday was preferred.

``Some people felt that in recent years, we had more people in the parade than were watching,`` a federation official said.

A total of 150 separate units, including marching bands and floats, are scheduled to participate. With U.S. Labor Secretary Bill Brock forced to cancel his appearance for medical reasons, a top aide, Dennis Whitfield, will be grand marshal.

The parade will begin at 12:30 p.m., moving down Clark Street from Wacker Drive to Van Buren Street. A reviewing stand will be at Washington Boulevard, with WBBM Radio`s John Madigan handling the official announcing chores. WLS-TV will have a delayed broadcast on Saturday.

According to federation historian Irwin Klass, the city`s first Labor Day parade was in 1890. That was four years before President Grover Cleveland designated Labor Day a national holiday to be set as the first Monday in September.

Cleveland was partly persuaded by the fact that there was no official holiday between July 4 and Thanksgiving. Moreover, since most people worked a six-day week, holding it on Monday gave everybody a much-wanted two days off. Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, maintained that Labor Day differed ``in every essential from the other holidays of the year of any country.``

All other holidays, he argued, were more or less ``connected with conflicts and battles,`` with ``man`s prowess over man,`` strife and discord and the ``glories achieved by one nation over another.``

In Chicago, the parade fell victim to the Depression and World War II. No large, formal celebration was held until a Labor Day parade was revived in 1980 by the late William Lee, longtime leader of the Chicago Federation of Labor.

And the Icemen`s Union? It eventually joined the Teamsters, Klass said. For those who grope to recall the White Rats, it was ``a bunch of actors.``